Life on the Edge

This morning I walked up the hill seen in yesterday's photo to take today's photo looking back towards the beach (not seen; off to the right) in order to show that there really are buildings hiding in a grove of trees. Like everyone, when I first bought Windgrove back in 1991, my first thought was to build my "dream" home on a section of land where I would have commanding views of the beach, be sheltered from southerly winds and have plenty of sun. This was certainly possible, but what I hadn't taken into account, and what most architects and home owners fail to take into account, is what visual impact this house would have on the landscape. In other words, would this house, or any house, enhance or degrade the visual appearance and character of Roaring Beach? In 1993, before building anything, I drove a converted Befored bus onto the land, tucked it into the trees and planned to live in it for a couple of years to "listen" to the land in order to best locate a future building site. Within a week, a Roaring Beach neighbor came up to me and said: "I can see your bus through the trees while I'm surfing and it doesn't look good". Although I was correct in wanting to listen to the land, what I had failed to "listen" to were the concerns of my community. From this point forward, their concerns were my concerns. I had every legal right to build whatever and wherever I wanted and my artistic ego certainly wanted to express itself out in the open, but the lesson quickly learned was that visual structures on private land, like noise itself, knows no boundaries. I had a moral obligation to respect the wishes of my community and to those visitors who came to Roaring Beach wanting to walk and swim in a relatively wild environment.